Post-2000s: Time to vote on the next countdown

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What should our next countdown be?
50.88%
29 votes
Comedies
29.82%
17 votes
Musicals
40.35%
23 votes
War
31.58%
18 votes
Noir
57 votes. You may not vote on this poll




Hello Pulp Fiction #1

I’m half kidding. I think I will probably go broad with my list. Otherwise it would be the Andersons, Coens, and QT
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Voted Comedies because I think it's the broadest and it feels weird to have much narrower genres represented beforehand.
I voted noir because I love noir, but I genuinely like this reasoning. I think it makes perfect sense.
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Hello Pulp Fiction #1

I’m half kidding. I think I will probably go broad with my list. Otherwise it would be the Andersons, Coens, and QT
Yeah, I'm not sure how I'll do it. There are definitely movies that aren't really comedies but that crack me up. Quills, for example, is hilarious and it makes me laugh way more than most actual comedies. However, I feel like it's highly unlikely that anybody else would vote for it and I don't even consider it a comedy.



I think the most noteworthy effect of a Comedy list would be an increase in strategic voting, for exactly the reason Vicky just said: concern that a favorite is too idiosyncratically funny for other people to list it/for it to show up, even if we find it hilarious.



Yeah, I'm not sure how I'll do it. There are definitely movies that aren't really comedies but that crack me up. Quills, for example, is hilarious and it makes me laugh way more than most actual comedies. However, I feel like it's highly unlikely that anybody else would vote for it and I don't even consider it a comedy.
Right, some of the Coens apply for sure, but I don’t think Fargo does. Pulp. Punch Drunk Love, Royal Tennenbaums. A bunch of my faves I find hilarious but I probably won’t vote for.



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Right, some of the Coens apply for sure, but I don’t think Fargo does. Pulp. Punch Drunk Love, Royal Tennenbaums. A bunch of my faves I find hilarious but I probably won’t vote for.
Gotta save that room for Some Like It Hot and It Happened One Night



Welcome to the human race...
I'm not sure what is a comedy will be as clear cut and easy to define as it seems. I've tried making a preliminary top ten for all four of these categories and comedies is actually quite hard. Do you go for the best film that happens to be listed as a comedy somewhere? Or should your list of comedies be comprised of the films you find funniest? Do we take a Shakespearian view of comedy as anything that isn't a tragedy? What if it's both comedy and tragedy? Does visual style go out the window in favour of a focus on humour? (For directors of comedies, the answer to that would seem to be yes, often, but should it?) Will the entire countdown be people moaning that the films aren't funny enough? (Probably - the 90s and 2000s countdowns had people moaning the films weren't 90s/2000s enough, even though the criteria was literally only to be released in the given decade). Or do I just not watch enough comedies? Come to think of it, TV comedies come to mind much quicker than film comedies.

(Obviously the answer to most of these questions is going to be that it's up to each person to compile their top 25 as they see fit.)
With the horror countdown, we determined eligibility based on whether a film was tagged as horror on IMDb. This did lead to a couple of high-profile omissions like Jaws and Aliens but the list still looks like a pretty solid cross-section of beloved genre classics. Of course, one way it can backfire is if you don't think a given film fits the criteria even though it technically does - They Live is a horror movie according to IMDb, but I consider it more of a sci-fi/action film than anything and thus didn't vote for it. Conversely, I'm of the opinion that broadening it out to "whatever people find funny regardless of genre" is going to be too much of a dilution. It's like what happened with the Action countdown a few years back where people were throwing in titles whose action credentials couldn't help but seem questionable like Ghost in the Shell or The Thing (again, films I love but wouldn't consider action movies by any stretch of the imagination). So I think I'm going to vote with an eye towards whatever can be qualified as comedy if it comes down to that, whatever that may be.
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So, I am already in the weeds just with how I would make a list personally if there are no restrictions. I thought I would look at my Letterboxd, and consider everything tagged comedy. I will take four of my faves as an example of how going by their tags would both restrict me and free me in ways I don’t like. Pulp and Fargo both not tagged under comedy. Chungking Express and Long Goodbye both tagged as comedy.

I think I will definitely go very broad. Lots of Steve Martin and early Sandler for me.



Right, some of the Coens apply for sure, but I don’t think Fargo does. Pulp. Punch Drunk Love, Royal Tennenbaums. A bunch of my faves I find hilarious but I probably won’t vote for.
Fargo is definitely a comedy. Most scenes with Buscemi in make me laugh out loud.



The trick is not minding
Whoever hosts will have their hands full. Comedy encompasses a lot of nuance at time. Satire comes to mind. Network, I’m looking at you. 👀

I can see a lot of disagreements on the horizon.



I don't see any major problems with a Comedy Countdown if the host chooses to do this:
I thought that comedy might be one of the easier genres to determine eligibility because it's a less strict genre than most other genres. Everybody has a different type of sense of humor, so the tags on IMDB and other sites shouldn't matter. Basically if someone thinks that a movie is funny, it should be eligible for their list. If a lot of people agree with them, then it will most likely make the countdown, but if they have some weird sense of humor, and nobody else agrees with them, then it won't make the countdown anyway...



I wish, and hope, it should prove to be so easy.
I think the fun part will be the riotous amount of off the wall movies that will make the list. That and knocking all the bad choices I think it will be a humorous countdown! I'm looking forward to it (that is if it actually wins the poll)